The previous months’ pages had been torn from the calendar, and the days of April 2004, the month in progress, stood out from the background, orange against dark blue. In a few weeks there would be elections in the Dominican Republic and according to all the polls his father’s party, the PLD, was going to win again. Until that moment he hadn’t asked himself why his father was trying harder than ever before to care for him, even if it was in Cuba and through Bengoa. It didn’t take long to reach the obvious yet painful conclusion that José Alfredo had sent him to Havana less out of concern for his son’s mental health than for the health of his own political career. A junkie son is a gift from heaven for anyone engaged in a dirty campaign, the kind of campaign that got dirtier the closer it got to the election. His father had freed himself of his problem and at the same time he had, in the eyes of the world, done a good deed for his son. On his way to the living room, Argenis, still naked, spit on the poster of Che as if it were José Alfredo’s face. “You’re a son of a bitch, but I’m an even bigger son of a bitch. You put me here because you’re ashamed of me, but I’m doing just fine with your money, cocksucker.” He took out two Temgesic vials instead of one and mentally rehearsed an excuse for Bengoa: “I needed something stronger, I had a panic attack.” He filled the syringe completely with 6mg of the stuff and shot up, contentedly imagining his mom and dad watching him through a peephole and seeing how his eyes rolled with pleasure on his way to the stratosphere.

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He still couldn’t motivate himself to go outside. Everything that happened on the other side of his apartment door seemed menacing and strange. He preferred to read Foundation and Empire, the Asimov book Bengoa had loaned him, to listen to his CDs, and to limit his outings to the balcony, where he’d lean out like an old gossip for hours, watching the confident comings and goings of others. There, he learned the intimate rhythms of his neighborhood: its rush hours, its secrets, the catalog of tonalities the light extracted from all things. The street bubbled over like a pressure cooker, full of unfamiliar gestures, of struggles and issues, of small aggressions, of possibility, of events Argenis pretended he could calculate before confronting them. Everything he needed, Bengoa brought. His little zone of control and its small disasters – power outages or water shortages, things also common in Santo Domingo – made him feel secure and calm.

For the first week, he shut himself in the bedroom he didn’t use for sleeping, put Lou Reed on the boom box, sat on the floor and, in his mind, converted the space into an extraordinary studio. It was really Philip Guston’s studio, which he’d seen in a documentary, although it was his own paint dripping down the canvases in the imaginary workshop. There were unpainted and half-finished works all over the place. On top of a large metal-topped wooden table were several plastic buckets full of brushes, some soaking in water and others brand new, with their bristles pointing up. They were good brushes, like the ones his father had bought on his trip to France with Genoveva to congratulate Argenis on getting into the Altos de Chavón art school. Mirta must have thrown those brushes out, he thought, because he’d never gone back to collect them after the divorce. The table had a shelf below it full of cans of acrylic paint, like the ones Guston used. Strange and mistreated objects from other eras, the kind he used to buy in Little Haiti behind the Mercado Modelo in Santo Domingo, adorned the corners. When the room was ready, he lit a Popular on this side of reality and, eyes closed, contemplated the piece he was working on in that magnificent place. The air smelled of paint, sweat, piles of cigarette butts, and the soot of the street.